Next Project

IUAV archivio e biblioteca

Part 2 Project 2010
Sean Douglas
 Mackintosh School of Architecture | UK
‘In the centre of Fedora, that grey stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today.’

Italo Calvino, Cities & Desires 4, Invisible Cities


Everyone has an idea of Venice that extends beyond the reality, whether romanticised, nostalgic, demonised, the city exists beyond the physical manifestation as we see it.
The IUAV has gathered a precious collection of schemes and dreams from architects and artists contributions to Venice, their idea of Venice, over the recent centuries. They include Le Corbusier’s H-Ven and Louis Kahn’s Palazzo dei Congressi’.

The project creates a home for these works, permanently on display yet archived in a way that expresses an idea about Venice captured in a few key themes;

Attic
Venice balances on piles above a lagoon. It regularly floods. The traditional safe keeping of treasures in vaults and cellars does not apply. The loft becomes the treasure chest of Venice. They reveal the craft of ship building in their timber frames, and emulate Venice with their stretching and groaning and fantastical appearance.

Solid space
An archive has an inherent quality of weight and silence. Solidity, or the appearance of mass are the embodiment of the might of the knowledge contained within. A mass can decay and crumble whilst retaining the memory of its form.

Colonnade
Associated with collegiate and monastic architecture the colonnade offers dignity, classicism and shelter from the elements.

Lantern
The lantern evokes the campanile whilst offering a solitary moment overlooking the city for the hardy scholar.

Threshold
The division of the archive into smaller cells and larger reference rooms mirrors the relationship of Venice’s grand Palazzos and tiny Calle.

Book stack
In amongst the stacks. It is dark and the floor creaks. As you move out towards the edge the solid walls of books melt to reveal light and the desk, dappled in refracted and reflected light, awaits.



The Venice Archive

Venice is one of the ultimate expressions of the act of civilisation, its formation a coalition of fragments into a labyrinthine unity; ossified and intact; a meniscus on the brink of a watery destruction.

The archives of Venice, papers dating from the 9th Century, are second only to those in the Vatican, the largest in the world.

Sean’s proposal for his archive, poised on the edge of the Canale della Guidecca in the sestiere of Dorsoduro, shaped out of the marsh grass and weeds of the abandoned Miralles’ new architecture school, nearby that church, San Nicolo dei Mendicoli, restored by Donald Sutherland in Roeg’s 1973 film, “Don’t Look Now”, engenders all the contradictions implied in saving these papers as the city sinks.

Permanence, prudence and security are expressed using a massive carved carapace giving shape below to its own island. This keep, this citadel, poised at the head of the canal addressing the Guidecca, draws a line between today’s Venice and the Venice of memory.

This sea-like creature arises directly from the lagoon, revealing and accommodating in its underbelly a loggia, which circumnavigates the island, stitching the neighbouring insulae by bridges, the whole the final keystone in a mosaic of islands.
This secret, this hardened crab-shell evolves into an expression of independent cellular clusters, roof forms echoing the Venice skyline, implying a series of attic rooms holding the precious artefacts, stored in a pragmatic and poetic manner, an expression of intimate safekeeping.

Overall there is a well observed use of historical precedent, producing a sensitive proposition, beautifully represented through a set of drawings which evoke a poignant atmosphere of robust decay.

Charlie Sutherland - Tutor

Tutor(s)
Fred Smith
Mr Charlie Sutherland
2010
IUAV archivio e biblioteca viewed from Chiesa San Nicolo dei Mendicoli
Student arrival and routes towards IUAV campus along dorsoduro spine.
Project themes and glimpse of IUAV collection.
Level 0; Library stands between the architecture and art departments surrounded by canals, using the Grand Loggia to orientate the meeting of paths through Dorsoduro and beyond with the new vaporetto stop.
Level 1; The Reading Rooms are wrapped arounf the central Bookstack using the deep cutting terraces to extract dappled light and air from their surroundings.
Level 2; Archive. The Courtard and Upper Loggia provide an organised spine to the more hectic cellular structure of the Archive. The larger spaces, toplit, allow the user to consult the works within. The smaller spaces house, always on display, the collec
Level 3; Hidden in the rafters the smaller cells of the archive use the heights of the larger spaces to nest in the rooftop, evoking the theme attic.
Level 4; The roofscape refers both to the surrounding rooftops of Venice and to the theme of attic space withing the archive.
South Elevation to Giudecca canal.
Section A; The Entrance Hall runs the full height if the archive and interlocks with the Grand Loggia to the outer edges.
East Elevation.
Aerial.
Section B; The Lantern refers to the Campanile, a space held in the air above the city and allows the lone scholar to contemplate Venice spread below.
Upper Loggia.
Detail.
• Page Hits: 10666         • Entry Date: 21 July 2010         • Last Update: 12 September 2010